Agreed. However, I don’t think this is merely due to buffs, but also increase in piloting skills.
The more familiar you become with Cr, the better you’re able to outplay it and the less defence you can get away with.
That’s at least been my personal subjective experience with crucible over the years.
EDIT: it’s kinda like a marathon. The first hurdle is just completing it. Then the next hurdle is completing it as quickly as you can.
I disagree. The best pilots vs good pilots is just like a 30s to 45s difference from the average and it’s been that way for a long time.
And the good Cr players have been good for a long time now. If anything the builds with crazy killing power diminished the skill required except for the really glassy ones. I’ve played the 6 minute builds and it feels like the enemies just don’t get a chance to attack lol.
Don’t get me wrong. It definitely factored in. But we went from 8 minutes being the top tier to the community pushing for consistent sub 6 being the norm.
Basically the numerical buffs can be tracked for a long time now. Actually the movement runes made a decent impact too to be fair. They’re not big on kill power. But they’re insane for shortening time spent walking.
But finally keep in mind that time reduced from best times becomes MORE significant as it accrues. Going from 8 minutes to 7 minutes is a smaller % improvement than from 7 to 6. So as things currently are any further time improvement looks extreme to my eyes from how it was.
However so long as the majority of GD’s community is having fun I’m happy to change my stance. I try to be neutral and just work with what the devs seem to be aiming for. I’ve always been vocal because I worry a small percent of power gamers are trying to get more more more and the average player is just non participating in discussion or resigned to go along with it.
Right. I do think this is a little extreme. IMO maybe a few truly synergistic, and well optimized builds should be able to push this under perfect conditions, but anything in the ball park of 6:30 - 7 I would call top tier.
They actually are huge in killing power. Being able to dodge attacks means you can effectively facetank for much longer. You can also body block far more efficiently with them.
EDIT: Not to mention that they allow you one free devotion proc
I’ve always respected this about you mate. <3
As far as I could read, power creep (and push) is in part because of the buff durations being 25 mins (this makes anything above 8 mins considered a meh build, and anything above 12mins a literally unplayable).
Another reason for the push is that repeating 150-170 is better than doing 100-150 then restarting a few times (3) at 130 and doing 130-150. The loot difference is minimal, the challenge difference is much larger, but the 30 waves you can shave off that way affects buff/tribute economy much more than anything.
Add a start at 130 option and you’re guaranteed that the push for faster 150-170 clears will diminish.
Right. Push for clear speeds has always been associated with efficient farming. I mean, many top pilots now go for speed records, but we can always just admire those builds, and acknowledge that they aren’t representative of GD
Exacltly this!
In Crucible there are “sweet spots” to land your build. Best is under 8 on average with 3 buffs and 1 banners, so you can sustain your tributes. And Crucible have less RNG than SR and it’s great way to farm for items. When start playing 150-170 had aroudn 30% of end game gear through campaign. For less than month playing had like 85-90%.
Now players of course loves to get competitive and do faster than light times, but there’s logical explanation about correlation between speed and success in Crucible. Also mind that there the most dangerous are the stackable debuffs and CC effects. The more you stay without killing the monsters, the bigger your chance of dying is. So there is difference between enough power to clear it and power creeps. Please don’t confuse them!
Was exactly my thought the time it started but i underestimated the magnitude.
At first glance it seems like your regular rant of the player frustraited about the game not meeting their expectations about the performance of their char. Yet here we are, what, 3 days later? and 310 comments. Smth to think about.
It’s funny how OP and the genius with secret builds seem to team up despite their goals contradict each other: OP wants every class combo and playstyle to be at the level of top tier builds, they want balance; the genius wants for their builds to remain unnerfed, i. e. to stay above of the intended bar of farming rate. “We vs them” is always stronger than reason. Fact.
I dunno. Seems like OP is being more reasonable now. Let’s be forgiving friends.
There is nothing to forgive. They got upset and made a rant, no harm done, it happens. But not every rant expands in such a huge thread so fast, that alone says OP is not completely out of their mind in the first place. But frustration can twist your message and turn people against you, it can even make you seek understanding from someone with basically opposite stance on the matter. Just some observations.
On the topic: there is no balance on a competitive level for several objective reasons. But just the fact that any 2class+playstyle combo can beat endgame is spectacular.
Sweeping your flaws under the carpet wont make any good in the long run anyway. If some build is inherently weak, not because it’s too crazy combination/idea, but simply because some items/skills/devotions are too weak, it’s a balance issue and should be fixed. Ladders can help in revealing it much sooner, thus, in fixing it much sooner. So, everything depends on developers’ will and abilities to improve the game.
I can assure you that’s not the case. ‘The genius’ doesn’t even play his builds. They are given to the HC teammates who had all voted for keeping them as reliable and fast farming options. I’ve seen those builds and even made 2 for the same purpose - safe SR and crucible farming. But I don’t play them much either. I don’t care about OPness at all. Now stability is something we really need in hardcore. And I’m not talking about reducing mob damage or any cheesy way like that. What I would really like to see in GD is the elimination or throttling down of some of the sudden damage spikes that literally come out of the blue and make your top char RIP regardless of defensive stats and piloting skills. Let me give you two recent examples.
Ekket’zul on normal. I can stand idle on his volcanoes and ignore their damage due to max and overlacapped resistances, high DA and regen. Killed the beast 100+ times yesterday. After one of the kills I remained standing on the volcano as usual (no debuffs were active). Within 1 sec it drained my health pool down to 10% procced my turtle and drained it down too and I barely managed to gulp a potion and dash away. WTF?
A random insect hero in the deeps, in a one on one fight did the same thing to me with poison damage. And that’s on Elite with 80%+60 overcap on poison resistance. How is that even possible?
This is the kind of balance I’d really like to get reviewed by the devs. In softcore you just shrug and keep rolling. In HC you could lose hundreds of hours.
“0 balance” isn’t right way to name the problem you described right now. It is present. I have a very tanky cold 2H melee build with -190% enemy res and good defenses, 3.2k armor among them. But it can die to some random bs and i have no idea what is happening. Huge dmg spikes from what seems to be some weird ass reflect even from hero mobs (can’t find it in GT) and sometimes i stop leeching on the spot. Without missing and -190% res applied to the enemy. It kills everything in a blink of an eye but also dies as fast as if the game is punishing you for such dmg.
Not sure you can call this balance problems. Rather some convoluted interractions slipped through the testing after recent monster buffs.
Maybe we should just start capturing infinite amounts of logs and record as many of these spikes as we can. I’m just not sure what’s best way to help the devs here.
As for zero balance, it’s all relative. The game is balanced around most its content, outside high level SR and some celestials. Which is fine by me. I don’t want there to be a way to kill Callagadra in under 1min lol. Are all types of builds in the same boat when it comes to crucible 6min mark? Not really. But I don’t really think it’s necessary either.
So, fix the random damage spikes and HC will be in good spot.
You post a grimtools link to your character at the time, tell them what mobs are in question (by name!), and whether any Dangerous Domain modifiers were active.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/M2g9QvKZ
Here’s the one I used yesterday for farming Ekket’zul on Normal. I can even provide a video where I stand on his volcanoes getting literally no damage. Yet the very last volcano still active after the creature’s death, nearly kills my char in one second.
This char is built to be invincible on normal and almost invincible on Elite, at least sub lvl 80 outside of dangerous domains. The only weakness to debuffs is chaos and a bit of poison maybe, but nothing outside of super bosses or nemesis should be able to cause any serious damage. And even with this approach, I get occasional ‘where did that come from’ moments. And no, no debuffs were present.
So, what did I miss?
Stacking DoTs? Crit by on-death proc? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
not sure, if you say something crazy, 10 people reply that it is nonsense and you keep insisting, going back and forth with each one, you can get a big thread pretty fast… the key is to keep the replies coming 
Of course the game is not 100% balanced, but it is not in the ‘OMG there is 0 balance’ territory of the headline
If you want to call out particular examples of unusually spiky damage, we can definitely take a look; but in my experience, there aren’t any I can think of that are “unexplainable”.
Sounds good. I’ve just ordered 4 TB of additional storage and will be recording everything from now on. Will post the evidence in the appropriate thread and hopefully it can be explained.
Don’t tell me this was your classless character you were levelling ? Please tell me he is still alive ?